The Last Straw  Just another day at the US Mint
by Eric Vought
Summary: A short   2600 w  fanfiction set in the Stargate Atlantis ficton. Secret Service agents purchasing straw bales for the US Treasury from de-wraithified wraith-turned agrarian find themselves up to their armpits in trouble only Woolsey can save them from.


The Last Straw — Just another day at the US Mint in the Pegasus Galaxy

6 April 2011

12

Special Agent Mark Kinman, United States Secret Service, put the Dodge Ram into 4-wheel drive as he pulled away from the Dancing Bear Inn and Pub. The GSA rate for reimbursing a lunch on the go in these parts was a buck thirty-seven. The Ram's inline-six diesel took the hill beautifully, bouncing and jouncing over the ruts made by ox-carts and the local horse-like "pogs." The AM/FM radio did not work out here, nor did the GPS, but for one million, two-hundred eighty-eight thousand apiece, the biodiesel-fueled trucks did have a jack to plug in his iPod, an in-dash DHD, and a thirty-caliber machine-gun with undercarriage ARG.

Getting the trucks to the Grûnhall (or as some of the employees called it, "Grungehole") mine, a little over three million light-years, had been 99 percent of the vehicle price tag. They could fit through through the anulus of a stargate (with the mirrors folded in) but a whole fleet of pickups disappearing into Cheyenne mountain would have been a bit hard to explain and getting them into Stargate Command's Gate Room would have been even more difficult. Only the SGC's stargate at Cheyenne Mountain could dial the Atlantis outpost across the galactic void.

The solution had been to drive the vehicles out to the middle of nowhere, load them into the launch bay of one of the US Air Force's X-303 interstellar cruisers, spend weeks ferrying them to a planet at the fringe of the Pegasus Dwarf Irregular Galaxy, and then drive them a few hundred light-years further via the event horizon of an artificial stable wormhole, the _stargate_. This probably violated the manufacturer's warranty in any number of ways, but the Dodge dealership was not told about many of the things the US Treasury Department did with its vehicles these days, including running them off of biodiesel esterized from the local Gava bean. The Treasury was reasonably pleased with their trucks: with regular maintenance and a carefully chosen route, the efficient diesel would get you about eight-hundred light-years to the gallon.

Today he was pulling a trailer out to a nearby community of de-Wraithified Wraith to buy a full load of straw bales for use in above-ground construction at the mint. A small bag of US Silver "Liberty" Dollars, otherwise known as Silver American Eagles or SAE, sat in the center console between Agent Kinman and his passenger. To a casual observer, the silver eagles would have been indistinguishable from those which could be purchased in any coin shop in the US in 20-coin plastic tubes— identical except for the odd little mint mark that is. A magnifying glass, a very high security clearance, and a need-to-know hard to come by even in rarified government circles would reveal the mark to be the Pegasus DIG gate symbol. Quite a few of the new coins were in fact circulating back on Earth, mostly in Chinese and Russian bank vaults.

The whole problem had started with increased trade between the members of the international Atlantis Expedition and the varied local human inhabitants of the Pegasus DIG. The locals' culture and economies were highly varied and the humans from Earth (or 'Tau'ri' as many of them now thought of themselves) were still proving themselves. Brokering deals for food against small amounts of C4 for stump removal notwithstanding, it was often convenient to be able to use some durable commodity for fluid trade and easy accounting. The International Oversight Administration or _IOA_ beancounters liked paying for their beans with something recordable as a simple number rather than assessing the fair market value of Nerf footballs and Zippo lighters a million parsecs from home. Paper currency backed by the "Full faith and credit of the United States" or that of any other Earth nation just did not get the locals' interest.

Enter the Silver and Gold Eagle (and the British Sovereign for a time). They were relatively compact, easy to use in trade, and of immediately identifiable value to most of the natives. The difference between their face value and their market value (a one oz 0.999 fine Silver Eagle was stamped with a one dollar face value) also gave the bean counters opportunities for creative accounting, so the US Air Force began transporting small amounts on each visit to Atlantis. When the IOA began implementing its _End Game_ strategy to protectively scatter Tau'ri outposts and resource acquisition all over the Pegasus and the Milky Way galaxies, the demand for gold and silver coin dramatically increased. So, the same solution as the US used during the San Francisco gold rush was proposed: let a contractor establish a local mint, let the locals bring in their unwrought silver and gold and trade them for finished, stamped and measured coinage. Once the facility is up and fully operational, buy the mint for the Treasury.

When Grûnhall was discovered, the operation ratcheted up to another level. The planet had a large, readily accessible deposit of electrum, a naturally occuring alloy of gold and silver, within an easy drive of the stargate. What's more, the Wraith had at some point started a mine shaft (they used electrum nanofilamints in extruding organic power conduit) and abandoned it after the Wraith overseer had allowed the local human miners to unionize. The miners and the overseer were all sucked dry by the inspecting Wraith queen who never bothered to restaff. Now, Tok'ra tunnel building technology allowed them to open new shafts and produce a steady stream of high quality ore.

The new ore not only eliminated the expensive cost of cargoing coinage from Earth, it quickly became a profit center in its own right. Most Earth cruisers returned from Atlantis empty. It was only good cents to begin filling their holds with precious metals and other commodities for the return journey. For the US, it allowed the Air Force to pay Russia to rent its stargate for use in the SGC (long story) and begin paying down its imploding debt to China. Several other IOA countries now had facilities of various kinds across the far-flung stargate network.

The Tok'ra technology allowed the mint to easily excavate and finish tunnels from pre-patterned templates, including conference rooms and living facilities. As the facility grew, however, most people, especially Pegasus-native contractors, preferred to live above-ground. Strawbale construction proved ideal both in matching local ambience and in dealing well with blistering summer heat and harsh winters on Grûnhall. That is where the Wraith— De-Wraithified Wraith, actually, or DRRs as they were known in official documents (I _know_ "Wraith" doesn't start with an 'R,' but tell that to the Air Force General who brokered the treaty...)— came in. A group of them operated a large agricultural facility an easy wormhole away. Although these nefarious demons have been modified by Dr. Keller's retrovirus— they no longer sucked the very lives out of human beings with a mere touch and seemed to have an inexplicable fondness for prune juice— the DRR's were still very scary, grouchy monsters with a complex and barely comprehensible legal system recognized under the treaty.

The evening was getting on as the truck came around a bend into the stargate clearing. For a moment, the low sun's angry blue pinprick glared bright through the center of the stargate anulus, apparently inspecting them and blinking its approval. At the same time, a light came on in the dashboard's DHD (or Dial-Home-Device) as the gate's own DHD recognized the presence of the truck. The Tau'ri had also modified many of the gates to store-and-forward email and other data as outbound connections were made to other planets. Mark's passenger, Special Agent Dale Hershaw, quickly punched a set of coordinates into the dash-DHD, blue chevrons lit up on the gate itself, and then...

Mark's heart always skipped a beat at this stage, no matter how many times he saw it happen: a hole was torn in the local time-space continuum and then ruthlessly chained by the mechanism of the aeons-old Alteran-built stargate, resulting in the _Ka-Woosh!_ of a dazzling energy vortex roiling forth toward the truck to devour it whole and then placidly settling back into the ring structure like a rippling pool of water stubbornly stuck sideways. Another dash light came on indicating that there was new email and the truck started rolling forward again, entering the _puddle_, demolecularized piece by piece, stuffed into a tunnel across light-years of space, and finally materialized at their destination in what appeared to be early afternoon.

As he consulted the directions briefly and began driving to the DRR facility, Dale pulled out a smartphone and began going through her email. She had one from her sister:

Dale,

Finally got your package. Jake has been going through books all day trying to find out what kind of fossils are in the rocks you sent. The Post Office really screwed things up: they claimed a 'postage due' of twelve TRILLION $ ! and would not let me have it until some guy named Tilk? showed up and held the postmaster upside down.

Anyway, it would have been nice to get a call :-( I don't care if you're in another GALAXY, I'm sure you can find a phone somewhere. It's not like you're guarding the President or something. The Air and Space Musuem is opening a new display next month on whether life exists on other planets. I know you love that stuff and Jake could go with you (hint, hint).

Take care. Watch out for those ruggedly-handsome foreign bar-hoppers, some of them are real animals.

They finally turned into the DRR settlement, driving past rows of what might have been bulbous agricultural equipment, including a new crop of just-sprouted tractors, and into a barn yard. Several ex-wraith youth were chucking straw bales out of a loft and loading them into a very similar truck and trailer belonging to the British Special Air Service (SAS). Mark and Dale got out of the truck, taking the pouch from the center console. A click on the key dongle locked the doors and energized the defense field. A quick question resulted in a finger pointed to a nearby outbuilding. Some jibes indicated that the youths thought Dale looked 'tasty' and a 'dish'. The Wraith got a lot of amusement out of Earth idioms.

One of the managers was just closing the deal with them over a tankard of prune juice when he looked up suddenly, "One of my accountants tells me that you still owe us money for the other load of straw," the ex-Wraith said angrily, presumably having been so informed over the psychic network such creatures possessed.

"That's the British government. We're with the United States Treasury. We've always paid up front."

"That went well," Dale said, "_We're_ the United States Treasury," she mimicked, in a disturbingly good rendition of James Earl Jones.

They were in Wraith 'holding cells,' about the size of a phone booth and held firmly with sticky organic webbing. The pouch of silver was gone, along with their sidearms, the dongle which deactivated the defense field on the truck, and the last tin of Altoids in the galaxy. The defense field was a South African device, actually, designed to stop car jackers with an 80,000 volt jolt. A little bit of Goa'uld technology added to the mix made it powerful enough to stop Wraith and very hard to disarm. The Treasury department had begun installing them in armored cars on Earth and figured they might as well go into the Pegasus DIG truck fleet.

"Remind me to throttle the next Brit I see," Mark said wearily, still trying to reach his pocket knife without needing to dislocate his shoulder.

"You might want to wait to see if he cuts us lose, first," she says.

"What?" he looked up, dropping the pocket knife he had just managed to get hold of to see a commando of the Special Air Service standing in front of them with a carbine aimed back down the corridor, "You! This is your fault!"

"Yeah, well, sorry about that. We ran into a sort of a financial problem. Bloody nuisance, really."

"Nuisance? You're not the one taped to the wall."

"We came back as soon as we found out you two had showed up. Figured you'd get into some trouble."'

"And you wanted your truck back."

"And we wanted our truck back, but we weren't going to leave you Yanks to the mercy of the Toddies."

"Toddies?" Mark asked.

"That's what we call 'em. 'Todd' was the first..."

"You know what, we don't _really_ need to know," Dale cut in, "We just call them DRRs."

"Dee-Are-Are...? Oh, that's really silly. You know, 'Wraith' doesn't actually start with..."

"Can we get out of here?" Mark cut him off again.

"Right-o, Chap. Don't get your panties in a bunch," the commando cut them out of the webbing and gestured down the corridor.

"How are you planning on getting out of the facility?" Dale asked.

"Us in our lorry and you in yours," he replied, "My partner is guarding the road to make sure they won't stop us leaving."

An argument ensued over the dongle for our truck. Getting our stuff back from the warden was not part of the plan.

"We'll just have to take your truck back to Grûnhall," Mark said finally.

"You can't take our truck."

"It's your fault we lost ours," Dale said reasonably, "Besides, your truck is already loaded with the straw _we_ paid for. We saw it when we came in."

"Ah, but we've got guns and you haven't." the commando pointed out. Mark held out the pocket knife he had retrieved from the floor of the compartment.

The commando pointed the carbine at Mark, "And just what did you have a mind to do with the rabbit-sticker?"

"Nothing;" Mark said, truthfully, as Dale clubbed him over the head from behind.

Back at the mint, Special Agent Kinman was doing paperwork when the British consul arrived, followed shortly by a delegation from the DRRs. The British wanted their 'lorry' back (and the commando we had left in a holding cell), the Wraith wanted to be paid, did not want to return the Treasury's truck, and both the DRRs and the Brits wanted Dale and Mark prosecuted for one thing or another.

It all had the potential to get very ugly but for an IOA lawyer who happened to be wandering through. He invoked treaty language requiring the use of a neutral arbiter for any dispute involving capital punishment (practically any Wraith law was a capital offense). The Toddies agreed that the IOA could be considered 'neutral' for the case.

It was several days later that Special Agent Hershaw came to report on the matter.

"Well, there's good news and bad news," she said, perching on the corner of his desk and kicking her legs. "The good news is that we have an agreement and it does not involve either of us in the custody of the 'Toddies'."

"That's good news," Agent Kinman said, not looking up from his Panasonic Toughbook, "All right, what's the bad news?"

"The bad news is that the Wraith have a custom of dining on the 'neutral arbiter' to seal any decision. It helps them to 'internalize the agreement' and incorporate it into their being or some such."

Mark shrugged, "Barbaric custom, that. I don't know that I could stomach lawyer, personally."

She got up from the desk and started toward the office door, "Well, if you change your mind, your portion is in the infirmary."

Mark stopped typing and looked up, "_My portion_?"

"Of Woolsey," she said.

1 A Stargate Atlantis fan-fiction. STARGATE ATLANTIS and related marks are trademarks of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. Other trademarks owned by their respective holders. This work may be redistributed with attribution but may not be sold.

2 1.2 (minor corrections)


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